Nor is a simple sniper rifle good enough for this overachiever. Does The Jackal quietly slip across at some unguarded point along the 3,000 mile US-Canadian border? No, he buys a sailboat and enters it in the Mackinaw to Chicago race, cheekily waving at the Coast Guard while he sails into the United States across the finish line of a regatta, so we can be wowed by his untouchable criminal prowess (or something). The plot bears little resemblance to the 1973 original, and what few plot elements from the original are echoed here are lost in translation in attempts to “update” them that instead makes them lose all logic. Instead, we get labored, try-hard attempts that make things absurdly overly complicated.
THE JACKAL JACK BLACK MOVIE
We’re told time and time again what an elite assassin The Jackal is, but the movie never does a credible job of showing it. There are few things that make me mentally check out of a thriller like this faster than when it is completely unable to convince me of the title character’s ostensible expertise. Teamed up with (re: under the supervision of) Preston and Koslova, Declan’s freedom might hinge on his ability to find and thwart The Jackal before it’s too late. When the FBI gets wind of the assassination plot but can’t track down The Jackal himself, they turn in desperation to an imprisoned former IRA sharpshooter, Declan Mulqueen (Richard Gere), whose path has crossed with The Jackal’s before. To this end, he hires a mysterious assassin known only as The Jackal (Bruce Willis) to carry out a high-profile assassination of a prominent US government official. When a strike team led by an alliance of tough-as-nails Russian policewoman Valentina Koslova (Diane Venora) and FBI Agent Carter Preston (Sidney Poitier) raids a mob nightclub and an ensuing fight results in the death of the brother (Ravil Isyanov) of a powerful mafia kingpin (David Hayman), the other mobster is unsurprisingly not happy, especially with the meddling American outsiders. We kick off in post-Soviet Russia, where the collapse of the Soviet Union has led to a power vacuum free-for-all which the notoriously brutal Russian Mafia is trying to fill. Fans of the 1973 film, or Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel of the same name, will be left decidedly unimpressed (unsurprisingly, both Zinnemann and Forsyth lobbied to have the film’s name changed to reduce its associations with the original), and so will everyone else save the most undemanding of action and/or Bruce Willis fans. The Jackal, a very ( very) loose remake of the 1973 Fred Zinnemann film The Day of the Jackal, is a patently ridiculous action thriller at every step of the way (sad for a movie loosely based on a meticulously logical original) but alas not enough to push it out of wallowing in flat mediocrity and into “so bad it’s good” territory. CAST: Bruce Willis, Richard Gere, Sidney Poitier, Diane Venora, Mathilda May, Jack Black, J.K.